1. Field of the Invention
Aspects of the present invention relate to an information recording medium and a recording and/or reproducing apparatus and method used to guarantee reproduction compatibility.
2. Description of the Related Art
In general, optical information recording media, such as optical discs, have been widely employed as media to store information which is recorded and reproduced by an optical pickup device in a non-contact manner. Optical discs can be classified as compact discs (CDs) or digital versatile discs (DVDs) according to the information recording capacity of the optical discs. Furthermore, optical discs capable of having information written, erased, and reproduced thereon and therefrom can be sub-divided into a 650 MB compact disc-recordable (CD-R), a compact disc-rewritable (CD-RW), a 4.7 GB digital versatile disc+recordable/rewritable (DVD+R/RW), a digital versatile disc-random access memory (DVD-RAM), and a digital versatile disc-recordable/rewritable (DVD-R/RW). Additionally, an optical disc capable of only having information reproduced therefrom can be divided into a 650 MB CD disc and a 4.7 GB DVD-ROM disc. Furthermore, there is also an optical disc having a recording capacity of 15 GB or more, such as a high-definition (HD) DVD or a blu-ray disc (BD). The development of a Super Rens disc using a super-resolution reproduction technique is also currently being developed.
Led by the music industry, content-providing business markets using the Internet are growing. Movie industries that distribute visual content, such as movies, which have a larger size per unit than music content, such as songs, are also expected to expand in the near future. Unattended information terminal systems provide information to users in a variety of multimedia forms, such as voice audio files, images, graphic videos, text files, and moving pictures in order to allow users to easily and conveniently access and use the information.
For example, a business model is currently being developed for a content-providing business in which a dedicated terminal system such as an unattended information terminal system is installed and a user can copy desired information from the unattended information terminal system onto a DVD-R. In the future, a business model in which information is copied onto a personal computer (PC) drive of a user or a hard disc drive (HDD) mounted DVD recorder of the user, and then copied onto a DVD of the user, will be considered. According to this business model, a disc key is assigned to distributed content in order to manage the copyrighted content of a copied disc.
In this context, the market has placed great importance on reproduction compatibility between the different types of information storage media available to users. In other words, for a disc to comply with the business models described above, the disc must be able to be reproduced in most DVD players and recorders in the market.